Writings about Education and Life in New England

With the advent of Act 77 one question that many Vermont schools are asking themselves is: what type of schedule best supports proficiency learning? Proficiency learning, after all, rids schools of seat time requirements, replacing them instead with simple, bottom-line subject area proficiency requirements. The familiar phrase under this new system is, “Learning is the constant and time is a variable.” This surely implies that

Here’s something I learned a few years ago as a teacher: not all time is created equal. Right now in Vermont, proficiency learning says, “Time is a variable.” And yet, time is most decidedly NOT a variable. We do not have infinite time to educate our students. The future is coming at them, hard and fast. Thirty-five years ago, “A Nation at Risk” called for

Here’s the thing about the Carnegie Unit — about the whole traditional system of education that’s being challenged right now by proficiency learning: The Carnegie Unit’s a sham. Here’s why. Right now, we pretend to award credit to students based on time. But there is no meaningful requirement for how much time. Sure, kids are required to attend high school for four years. They have

Amazing, isn’t it, how much difference a sense of humor makes? This fall, we were sitting in a staff meeting, groping our way through the dark, trying to understand how to teach in a proficiency-based classroom. As usual, we were all confused. We had been talking about how, in a proficiency system, “Learning is the constant and time is the variable.” Now a coworker was

When I was in high school, I hated history class. All that dry history in all those heavy textbooks felt dead to me, obsolete. Hardly surprising, of course — like many teenage boys, I had about as much empathy as a piece of scrap metal. But the older I get, the more vital and urgent studying history seems. That’s because I’m realizing more and more

Over the past year, as I have begun to read more about education, I’ve become more conscious of what I would term the “Reform Industry” in the United States: the web of companies, foundations, philanthropies, and advocacy groups that insist that public education is 1) in crisis, and 2) must adopt whatever their chosen idea is right NOW. Because I have this remarkable fellowship opportunity

One of the great debates in education for the past (who knows how many) years is this: How much can schools really control? We Americans are ambivalent about schools. We don’t want our kids in school for a whole year, don’t want them studying too much, but we also believe that education is the silver bullet for a host of societal problems. We tend to

In a week and a half, I’ll be 37. My birthday’s coming up and I could not be more excited. That’s unusual for me. Because as sad as it is, if I’m being honest, my birthdays stopped being interesting around the time I turned 22. It’s hard to imagine you’ll ever get to this point; when you’re a kid, your birthday is VERY important. It’s

One of the popular new terms in education, certainly in Vermont but also nationally, is “personalized learning.” For the past two years everyone has been talking about it in my school and state. Same goes for its sister term, “personalized learning plan.” About a year ago, I began to realize that not only was everyone talking about personalized learning, but they were using it to

The Origin of the Workshop Model One of the most influential approaches to teaching English / Language Arts for the past 30 years has been the “workshop” method — sometimes called “writing workshop” or “reading workshop” or “that Lucy Calkins thing that my district forces us to do under threat of torture.” While this approach only occasionally touches American high schools, it has been hugely